Link building is an integral part of SEO. Without a solid link building strategy achieving the top position in search results is definitely harder if not impossible. So how do you build links to your website? There are two schools of thought here. Some contend that building hundreds of links through link farms and article submissions is the way to go. And the other which focuses on quality link building.

Writing Guest Posts

Simply one of the best ways of getting quality back links, guest posting has been considered an essential linking technique for many SEO experts. Similar to article submissions, guest posting is one of the most difficult link building strategies to execute.

The benefits of guest posting goes beyond the realm of SEO. Other advantages include the opportunity to interact with fellow bloggers and establish yourself as an expert in your niche. Below are simple steps to get you started at guest posting.

• Find blog sites similar to your niche
• Choose high quality blogs or those with high PR
• Submit your best blog posts
• Engage in the community
• Create an author bio that contains your target keyword with your link

Social Bookmarking

Building quality links to your blog could easily be done by submitting these to social bookmarking sites. Popular sites include StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg. These sites are regularly crawled by Google’s search engines making it a good place to build links.

These websites have high PR and are often visited by search engine spiders. This makes links created on these sites highly valuable.

Blogging Directories

Blogging directories and communities are the social networking sites for bloggers. Some of the top blog sites are located in these directories and share their latest post with fellow bloggers and readers. These sites are great for getting targeted traffic to your blog and could supply you with much needed juice.

Posting on Top Forums

A link building technique that people often forget is targeting forums. High traffic forums provide us with an easy method of getting links. Why bother spending hours creating a single article for an article submission site when you could get a link by posting a few words or starting a discussion.

However, some forums require a certain number of postings before you could get a link on your signature or forum post. Some good sites include Yahoo Answers or Google Forums.

Blog Commenting

Similar to forum posting, blog commenting gives you the opportunity to get high quality links by providing meaningful content and insight to blog posts. The quality of the links you get from these is directly associated with the blogs PR. Try to focus your efforts in targeting high quality sites to improve.

Quality and Quantity

There are two schools of thought when it comes to link building. Some contend that quantity has its own quality and submitting to link farms and article submission sites is the quickest way to build up your links. But after Google’s latest updates, the quality of links thru these methods have been severely downgraded. Quality has a price and the cost of getting quality links is the time spent on each of these.

5 HQ Link Building Techniques for Bloggers from Myblog2day

Unique content

If you are an experienced SEO person you will already know that unique content is really important when it comes to ranking. But with the Panda update this has been taken to another level altogether. For instance you will want to pay special attention to duplicate pages that are automatically generated by some CMS. This is why it might be important that you update to the latest version of your CMS software. If it is a custom made one make sure that you get in touch with your web designer to find out whether it complies with the latest Google requirement.

Ads ratio to content

One of the objectives of the Google Panda update is to present only useful sites to the user and this is why it tends to eliminate MFA (Made for Adsense) sites from the ranking page. For this reason it might be important that you reduce the amount of ads on your site so as to prevent the Panda slap. If you are using Google AdSense this could be a blessing in disguise since your earning per click can go up.

Become an authority

Forget about your 5 pages website that you were building to make a few bucks off AdSense.  As said before, the Panda update tends to penalize MFA site and this is why it might be important that you avoid this. Just make sure that you add some content regularly to make sure that your site remains at all-time useful for visitors. In other words become an authority on the subject.

Social Media engagement

The Google Panda update tends to place a lot of focus on the amount of time your site is shared on social media site such as Twitter and Facebook. We all know that big brands have all benefited from this update and one way that you could build your reputation is by making sure that there is some form of engagement on your site. It might be important that you install some buttons on your site in order to facilitate the sharing among various social media site.

The Google Panda update has brought about some important changes to the way SEO is conducted on your site. The sooner you make the adjustments to your site the quicker your site might recover and the higher your site may rank in the SERP.

Image from Wickedreport.

4 relevant SEO tips after the Google Panda update from Myblog2day

Planking is yet another craze, fueled by, none other than our very own Internet (Facebook to be more precise) and it’s all about lying face down, preferably at some public (or any other absurd place), taking a photo and sharing it with others on social network. While some of these plankers actually choose an interesting place or angle, the practice in itself, is as pointless as any other meme (and at times quite unsafe). But regardless of how pointless or inane an Internet craze sounds, for a marketer, that actually shows how much buzz and free publicity can a seemingly pointless but smartly triggered trend or viral content can create for your business, remember people dancing at apple stores? Oh and talking of Apple, their are images of some of Apple employees doing planking.

So, what propels me to make this ludicrous claim that an internet marketer, who’s not aware of this weird meme is not good at his/her jobs? Well, despite being a little overbroad, the title is actually not wide off the mark, because it highlights the importance of staying acquainted with each and every “in thing” at cyber world, especially those which are getting popular amongst your targeted consumers.

Being a marketer, one has to be aware of how these Internet trends and fads work, because it can help a great deal in developing viral marketing or link bait campaigns. Once you are able to asses as to what attracts people’s attention and what doesn’t, you can come up with much better content, videos, and advertisements.

Let’s take a look at how this knowledge can help in different phases of Internet Marketing.

Content Creation

Web has its own language, or dialect, and when you are writing content for the web, you have got to keep this distinction in mind, or your content will fall flat. While creating content, you’ve got to keep in mind things like what makes an internet user click at a link, what grabs their attention when they are quickly scanning through the pages, what makes them stop and comment, things like that will help you create the content that stick out and do the job.

Link Building

With each passing day, and with each impending update in Google’s algorithm, link building is becoming more and more difficult. Slowly but surely, all of those easy and bulk link-building methods are losing their worth, link building is certainly not a copy-paste job, marketers need to select target websites carefully, then analyze each of these short listed targets and think of appropriate ways to approach the webmasters, and acquire a link to your website. No matter how good and deserving is your website, a lot will depend on how you engage the webmasters, try contacting them with a make-shift template and they will instantly discard your message as spam. The internet marketer or SEO professional needs to be internet savvy to be able to realize the nuisance of spam and how to go around all of these hurdles, and win a back link for his/her website, which is well worth the effort.

Product Development

Internet started as a quick and relatively inexpensive mode of communication, it slowly transformed into an information hub and also an entertainment source, and now it is slowly becoming the place to do business. Being the internet marketer you need to keep an eye on all of these developments, trends, and how the online consumer behavior and overall culture is taking shape, only then you will be able to develop appropriate products for your online business.

Image from Apple Wallpaper.

Why you are a bad internet marketer if you don’t know what’s planking from Myblog2day

One of the aspects of doing business is cost cutting but sometimes cutting your budget for certain necessities can end up resulting in a Phrrhic victory. Seeing SEO as a one-time endeavor is like saying, “I don’t need food. I ate last month.” Any company, no matter the size, should be active online and always perusing advice and tips from professionals that will help them keep doing business. Search rankings are everything these days and if your ranking is suffering so will your results in business.

Many marketing industry leaders, like Neil Patel, have often underscored that one of the harshest realities of business is not using Search Engine Optimization for your venture. The second worst is not doing it properly and knowing the difference. Neil points out that there are two major different kinds of SEO. One is on-page optimization. This is easily done and manipulated. The other, and better approach, is off-site optimization. This is when you create content that is posted on another web site but provides links that direct users back to your page. This is key towards increasing your online profile and search ranking. It is by using these tactics that Patel has become so successful through KISSmetrics as well as his most recent venture that’s designed to help people learn to play poker. Just because you’re using SEO doesn’t mean you’re using it wisely and sometimes know the difference can make all of the difference.

Another one of the biggest mistakes when choosing your URL is when a company doesn’t canonicalize their site. If you’re not sure what this means it goes a little something like this. Let’s say you buy the domain, www.mywebsite.com. Canonicalizing is when you buy all of the variation of that name, like: www.mywebsite.com/, mywebsite.com, and mywebsite.com/. When you spend all of your money on promoting your site with SEO and other marketing approaches, you may not realize that you end up promoting four different sites. If you’re not sure if there are others using similar URL’s, go check. You may be giving someone free publicity while detracting from your own.

Saying you need SEO and good marketing is a bit of an understatement but it is really important. Yet, sometimes, not making common SEO mistakes like these are equally important. Follow some of these tips and get some professional help. You don’t have to spend your whole marketing budget on this but don’t risk losing out on lucrative online business by neglecting your businesses SEO needs.

Biggest SEO Mistakes by Companies from Myblog2day

1) Blog commenting
This is by far one of the most popular strategies nowadays. If you are familiar with blog commenting you know that it is no problem to get backlinks from several sources and in the right quantity. Other than this, it’s better to leave comment on a similar niche blog, if you have a blog that talks about brochures, then probably you want to leave comment on brochures related niche blog.

Simply go do Google.com and search for the following parameters: site:blogspot.com your keyword , site:flickr.com your keyword, site:hubpages.com your keyword , “powered by wordpress” your keyword. This is how you find targeted content on which you can leave a blog comment with your backlink. By using site:blogspot.com for example, Google will filter all blogspot.com sites. By using “your keyword”, Google will only show pages which have relevant content for your keyword. You can leave a few blog comments each day and increase the number steadily. You can also search for broader keywords.

2) Article directories
This one is very hot and super effective as well. There are many different ways to get backlinks accomplished. The first option is to write a 400+ word article and submit it to ezine, squidoo or hubpages. You don’t want to submit the same article to numerous sites. Each article has to be unique and at least 400 word + long to match the guidelines of the article site. You can write one unique article and submit it to 10 + article directories. Some of them are goarticles.com, articlebase.com, articlealley.com, etc.

Now comes the important part, you want to do this a few times each week. It´s not so important to do a lot at a time, but to do it continually. Your articles don´t have to be perfect because we are not doing article marketing here. We are after backlinks and we are after quality backlinks.

3) Guest blogging
This is the masterpiece of all strategies that are available at the moment. One guest post from a PR 5 site can be worth more than hundreds, even thousands of blog comments or backlinks from article directories. This is a strategy that requires some effort at the beginning, because you want to find other websites which allow you to write articles on an occasional basis for them.

First of all, the site has to be relevant to your niche and need to have PR (1 – 10). The higher the page ranking , the better and the more backlinks you get from different sites the more importance you build. How can you find these targeted sites? Go to Google.com and use the following search parameter: “write for us” your keyword. That´s all that is required to find such sites. By using the parameter “write for us”, Google will filter all sites that have a category or page set up with the name “write for us” which means that these sites generally allow up to 90% or more of their content to be done by guest blogging! If you are into internet marketing, search for online marketing, internet marketing, etc. by using your keyword. Then contact the admin and ask if you can write a guest post for them.

You can outsource the content creation by using professional article writing services. You can do the writing by yourself or accept the help of a writing service.

Take these tips and focus on getting backlinks constantly!

Image Credit : Christopher.F Photography

Getting Backlinks Made Easy With This Formula from Myblog2day

Be warned of those SEO gurus who say they know everything for sure or know some secrets of SEO.There are some SEO rules which people like to follow strictly or are really serious about. But, many of them may be myths and may not really matter that  much. I would like to point out some SEO rules which may be myths but nobody can be sure.

Google Sandbox

Google sandbox is perhaps the most popular myth that new sites are penalized by google for no reason. But, according to Matt Cutts, google sandbox doesn’t work as we think. As we see examples of new websites not ranking for months and also we see new websites getting ranked instantaneously, its hard to tell how google really handles new websites.

301 Redirect can result in loss of pagerank

Matt Cutts said he sees how 301 redirects can lead to some pagerank loss. But, he never explained how 301 redirects can cause a loss in pagerank when 301 redirects are the legal way of redirecting and it means site permanently moved that means all benefits should be transferred to another domain. Before Matt Cutts said this we all thought 301 redirect doesn’t cause loss in pagerank. Can we really take Matt Cutts’ word for it? He is a google employee with a responsibility. He can’t always tell the truth. There is ambiguity. He may not want people to use this technique to build backlinks.

Are all Domain Names same

Some claim all top level domain extensions are same and you can achieve equally good rankings with all top level domain extensions. Some say .com is superior to others and ranks easily. In addition, it’s better to get a exact match domain for the keyword you want to rank. For example, you want to rank for the keyword “postcards“, so you should actually purchase a domain name which has the keyword in it, says highqualitypostcards.com or etc.

Do you really need pagerank to rank in search engines

Bloggers are crazy about pagerank. The craze has decreased in last one year when google took nine months to update pagerank again. Most of us seem to agree pagerank doesn’t help if links are irrelevant.

Dedicated IP and SEO

Many say dedicated ip hosting doesn’t affect rankings in google. Others say it does affect rankings as dedicated ip is a scarce resource and google easily identifies your website on a dedicated ip thinking it must be special to be on a dedicated ip!

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is really bad and will break your site. But we all know people have made lots of money out of duplicate content in the past. If you put same content on two sites, which one will rank higher? Say, give them a month difference. I still think the one with more backlinks will rank higher even if it was posted a month later.

Dropped domain backlinks loss value

Many say after a domain is dropped, the value of backlinks it had before the drop is nulled which really seems to be the natural thing to happen. But, there are many examples of domains recovering pageranks even if registered after a year of the drop if the backlinks are still intact.

Backlinks from different domains hosted on same IP

It is thought that if you get backlinks from websites hosted on same ip, you get penalized. Well, if  you are blog farming then you surely will get penalised. But, if you have genuine blogs then its only natural thing to interlink as long as you don’t do it too much and links are relevant. Its safe to interlink as long as these links remain a small chunk of all the backlinks. Just my thoughts, would like to know what you think!

Domain Age

Does a domain name gain authority because of age or it gains authority only after a website is put on it and links are build to it? Does it help buying a 1995 registered domain but a site was never built on it?
Well, this was really an effort to stimulate some discussions, so share your experiences and what you really think about the various points listed above?

Image Credit : raul_pc

SEO Myths OR Not You Decide from Myblog2day

If you’re still wondering exactly what seo is, search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of modifying a website to enhance its chances of appearing in the top search results when relevant keywords are entered into a search engine. In other words, it’s one of the most effective ways of increasing the volume of traffic and incidental visitors to your website, which at the end of the day means more new customers or clients for you. Now it’s time to clear up some of the most common misunderstandings surrounding this, most important, aspect of web development. When you set out to boost the seo for your website, beware the following bungles:

1. Do not try to maximize your search engine ranking by including a new page for every single one of your keyword targets or including all of the most common misspellings of your keywords. As well as ranking highly on search engines such as bing or google, your website must be functional and easy for visitors to manage. By using high quality content that artfully includes keywords in the page title, description tag, sub headings, body text and links, one page can be optimized to successfully target countless keywords.

2. Do not think that you will boost seo by including the names of every city or postcode within an eight hour drive of your business. Of course it’s essential to include the location where your business is situated and the nearby locations you serve, however, including the names of cities that are at more than a reasonable distance will only frustrate your potential customers. Sure, your page may appear in a greater number of search results – but what’s the advantage if, after one click, visitors realise that you can’t meet their immediate needs?

3. Do not stuff your website with keywords. Certainly the placement of keywords is an essential seo tactic, but don’t go overboard with it. Not only is this likely to make the content of your website dry and unappealing, it can earn you serious penalties. Concealing keywords on your website is another seo tactic to be avoided for the same reasons. Placing thousands of words of keyword rich content in the footer of your webpage, or placing keywords in white text on a white background (or black on black and any other same colour combination) is still sure to get you caught out by the anti-spam teams of most search engines.

4. Do not try to have all of the pages of your website ranked highly in search results. More indexed pages do not necessarily mean more traffic. Inner page rankings can certainly contribute to seo, but this should not be an immediate priority. Not only will this waste your time and effort, all things considered, having a link to the home page of your website on the first page of search engine listings is far more valuable than having all of your indexed pages listed on page ten or twelve of the search result returns.

Finally, if you’re still not sure you’ve got a grasp on the do’s and don’ts of SEO, nothing beats consulting a seo professional.

Image Credit : Momoc HDR

Top 4 SEO Tactics to Avoid from Myblog2day

I come across many websites that contain a lot of content but it won’t help with their SEO efforts because it’s too focused on selling a product or service. It does nothing to inform or educate the potential customer before trying to make the sale.

The average consumer today is far more sophisticated and informed than at any other period in history. They are far more likely to make a purchase after they have been informed rather than sold. The search engines have been designed with this in mind so you will have to please them in order to rank well. The bulk of your content should be focused on information and less on sales.

I would like to discuss the three main elements of SEO content creation which are the effective use of keywords, back linking and article submissions.

Effective use of Keywords

Google, and other search engines, look for unique, informative, well written content on your site. If you use the same keyword over and over again (sometimes called “keyword stuffing”) the search engines will detect that the article is “spam” and not unique or informative.

Google does this so well due to a indexing and retrieval method known as “latent semantic indexing”. This method looks at patterns within a group of text. For this reason, it’s important to use different variations of a keyword in your content while providing useful information at the same time.

The basic guideline for keyword density is to place your main keyword in the first sentence, once in each paragraph and near the end of your article or post. Use variations of the keyword elsewhere in the article, if needed.

If you have trouble writing, or don’t have the time, you can outsource your content creation by hiring a freelance writer. There are many good freelancers with competitive rates at sites like vWorker.com, TextBroker.com and eLance.com. Make sure you tell them exactly which keywords you want to target and where to place them.

Back Linking

Another reason why it’s critical to create effective content is so that other webmasters will want to link to your site and let others know about you. This creates a lot of inbound links to your website. Google finds these inbound links and will rank your site higher in the search results.

You can actively seek out other webmasters and offer to exchange links or they will come to you as your site grows in popularity.

Another method of getting back links is to post comments on blogs, social networking sites and in discussion forums related to your product’s niche. The same rules of content creation for your website apply when posting comments on other sites.

You want your comments to be unique, informative, well written and interesting. They should add something to the discussion on not just come off as a sales pitch. Obviously, the comments should be relevant to the niche of the particular site you’re posting on. If you follow these guidelines, people will like what you have to say and click through to your website.

Article Submissions

You will be creating unique and informative articles as you would for your own website but you will be submitting them to article databases like Ezinearticles.com and GoArticles.com. You can also place them on other relevant blogs in your niche as a “guest blogger”.

These articles have to be different from the articles you place on your own site or the search engines will detect them as duplicate content. These articles will also serve to provide backlinks to your site since you will be able to place a link in your article and in the resource box.

Other webmasters will also find these articles and link to them if the content is good.

Again, you can outsource the writing of these articles if you find it to be a more effective use of your time.

This is just a general overview of the basic methods of effective SEO content creation. There are many more details I couldn’t cover in the scope of this article so I’d like to hear from you. What are some tips and tricks of your own that you can share?

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Secrets of Effective SEO Content Creation from Myblog2day

As much as SEO professionals want to produce results for their clients, no one can guarantee anything. Companies measure the success of SEO in various ways; increased PageRank (although this has fallen by the wayside for most), more visitor traffic or increased conversions are just a few. Usually a successful SEO campaign will see gains in all three of these areas, as well as others. But any SEO firm or professional “guaranteeing” a website will see X% increase in visitor traffic or grow by X links in three months is to be avoided at all costs.

Chances are these companies and so-called professionals are employing black hat techniques to artificially increase a website’s search engine ranking or number of one-way inbound links. While this may look impressive at first, the growth is nothing more than a forced spike and will disappear as quickly as it came. These black hat SEO techniques will only end up hurting a website’s reputation in the long run. They are seriously frowned upon by the search engines who will penalize a website if they think the site is trying to scam the search engines. If enough red flags are raised, the website can get removed from the search engine results entirely. It can take years to overcome the negative effects of black hat SEO.

If a website owner is really unlucky, their guarantee-toting SEO company will take their fee, anywhere from $50 a month to a few hundred dollars, and disappear. Not even bothering with the black hat techniques, they simply take the money and run. It is SEO firms and professionals like that that gives the industry and practitioners of white hat SEO a bad reputation. A scarred client is less likely to trust the advice of a reputable SEO professional and can further hinder the growth of their website.

For anyone looking to hire an Internet marketing firm or SEO professional, anyone guaranteeing their results should be avoided at all costs. No reputable SEO professional is going to guarantee their work, but they will take the time to carefully guide a company through the benefits of SEO and SEM. Website owners should take the time and research any outside company or professional they look to hand their online reputation over too. It is too important to risk.

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There Are No SEO Guarantees from Myblog2day

The PANDA update is one such change, making more ripples on the SEO surface than any other update in recent past. The last time we see a similar hoopla was when Google came down hard on the paid directories. And even though paid directories were the only sufferers (wasn’t really an update in algorithm), but the “hit” clearly make some changes in the priorities of SEO guys. I can see the same thing happening with the recent PANDA update (AKA Google farm update). Back then, it was web directories that suffered, and now there are article directories (and their modified versions known as content farms). In spite of the fact, that it affected content farms in general, the update has managed to induce some questions in the SEO’s mind, and this fear is likely to change the way people carry out Search Engine Optimization.

Article Marketing via Article Directories

Already, we can see ezinearticles.com making drastic changes to their editing and publishing rules. From increasing the word limit to raising the quality standards. In fact, they were even thinking of changing the do-follow attribute to no-following in author’s bio; much to the dismay of their authors (thankfully they have retreated for the time being). All things considered, article marketing has certainly lost some of its worth. Whilst some low quality directories will continue to do what they were doing, the more serious ones will certainly become stricter about their content quality, even if it means publishing fewer articles.

The websites will be more cautious about the duplicate or spun content, especially in the niches where supply has already exceeded the demand. As far as back links are concerned, there is no clear indication that Google has also devalued the links coming from these websites, but still we can expect some changes in the linking policies of these websites, for example, ezinearticles.com is already encouraging the authors to keep their bio in line with the content of the article.

There’s no reason for the SEO professionals to get demoralized though, in fact, this change should be welcomed by those who are more into quality work. The only type of marketers who will be hurt are those who were relying heavily on article marketing via directories (finding a niche, then writing and doling out 100′s of low quality articles to rank for the keywords targeting that niche). On a side note, this update will also take a toll on freelance writers churning out third rate articles for $4 – $5, those articles were nothing but a substandard amalgamation of information easily available on the internet at 1000 different places. Good riddance, I’d say.

Guest blogging

Panda update hasn’t only scared the article directories or content farm owners, as we can see a little reluctant on part of Bloggers who accept guest posts, especially when it comes to keyword rich anchor text in byline or within the body of articles. There’s no reason for these blogs to panic though, the Panda update was meant for websites that were churning out useless content and adding to the overall spam with an insane speed, it’s true that some quality websites have to put up with the update targeting content farms, but that was probably more of a bad luck. Guest blogging is much more than a tactic to get some back-link and host bloggers are extremely nit-picking when approving a post to go live on their website (unless the Blog is running on some revenue sharing model), even then the editors at these Blogs are seemingly doing a much better job than the editors at article directories (you can’t blame them though, because they have to deal with much bigger numbers of submissions).

Conclusion

Saying that PANDA update hasn’t changed anything is wide off the mark; on the other hand, saying it has totally eradicated the methods like article marketing will also be an overstatement. If anything, you need to focus more on quality than quantity when writing either articles or guest posts.

Image Credit : tommyhofer

Google Panda Update – Will it affect Article Marketing and Guest Blogging in any way? from Myblog2day